$24m Series B: 11 Months from A to B

How moving from a product driven company to a sales and product balanced company helped us scale revenue.

Let’s start in the middle

I joined Framer just after our series A with the task of building a sales force around one of the most beloved tools for designers. Since it's inception Framer has been a product focused company with the best product team I've ever seen, but to really scale we needed to find a balance as a company between product and sales.

My experience with design was rather limited, but I’ve launched several products where I learned the power of strong design as well as the pain felt with poor user experience. While this gave me some appreciation for good design, it didn’t help prepare me for the challenges of building a sales team within the design ecosystem.

My previous sales and sales management experience was with companies that had a sales force from day one. This often has a profound impact on shaping the trajectory of the product and company. The most obvious impact on startups that launch with sales leadership or a full time sales rep is that institutional product knowledge from the early days is filtered and stored by the one person selling. As the sales team scales, that knowledge is passed down and shared as a store of knowledge that has already been translated into its own sales language, and thus, easily understood by other sales people.

Over time this store of sales/product knowledge is usually packaged up in a very repeatable format that scales easily and allows for new hires to quickly adopt product pitches through scripts, role plays, demos etc. This is the only playbook I’d known prior to joining Framer.

In my time here, I’ve learned what it means to jump into a company that has been product-led and find a way to inject a sales balance. Though every company is unique, I think the following lessons apply for any company that has achieved rapid growth through product leadership and adds a sales team at the growth stage.

Turning the corner into a Sales Balanced Company 

One of the first things we realized was that we needed to get our product knowledge to a place that allowed us to experiment enough to find a repeatable sales process. This is a delicate balance of investing time in product knowledge and actually putting in the sales hustle to create opportunities that allow us to practice what we’ve learned. Our most senior Account Executive, Dave Askin, calls this the tradeoff between “sharpening the axe and actually chopping wood.” Do you choose to spend your time learning or selling.

Many sales reps are over-indexed in sales skills instead of product/technical knowledge and are great at all things related to the “sales hustle.” But having more sales hustle than product knowledge often manifests itself with misalignment between client expectations and true product value once a deal is closed.

At Framer striking the balance out of the gates was more challenging than I would have thought as we didn’t have that oral sales history that accumulates organically and is passed down to generations of sales reps and refined over hundreds of sales cycles. And while our leadership and product teams were generous with their time by providing product and industry knowledge, our education had to start from scratch.

We solved this by focusing on training new sales reps and new customer success reps with small but intense doses of knowledge that built over time. Today we have all new sales reps partner with a veteran rep to help get them up to speed quickly. They do this by teaching the new rep everything they’ve learned at Framer and regardless of the new rep’s seniority level they focus heavily on product knowledge in the first month. Every new sales hire is essentially an SDR for the first month which allows them to learn our systems and our product without having to worry about a quota and the complexities of managing sales cycles. Reps immediately feel like a part of the team and learn everything they need to be successful, while carrying out tasks that add value for the entire company.

Hiring a new breed of sales reps. Curiosity (and technical skills) is king

As we began to scale we had to quickly figure out how to calibrate the level of design skills, technical skills and sales skills when hiring. Understanding the type of rep that would be successful at Framer was a bit of trial and error, but we’ve figured it out.

Because our Sales Team needs to engage with some of the best designers in the world, we need particularly curious sales hires who are interested in learning design AND have a more technical background than most. Our sales team members need to be genuinely curious in the people they’re selling to and the technical aspects of how Framer will work with their prospect’s current tech stack. We’ve found that sales reps who can program or would describe themselves as “more technical” than their peers thrive at Framer. Reps who are bored selling the same SaaS value prop/tool over and over at their previous companies and want to leverage their interest, skills or background in programming have been our best hires.

Curiosity is the most underestimated quality in a sales person. I find that many people I interview don’t do any research on me. Now, I’m not a megalomaniac, but in an interview you're “selling to me” so the more information you have about me, the easier it is to sell to me. Sadly, as I write this post, I know many candidates won't take the time to read it, even though it provides the candidate insight into the organization and culture they are interviewing to join. This may seem obvious, but for those who aren’t curious it’s not.

Another interesting test of curiosity is whether a candidate has downloaded a free trial of Framer. Some don’t, even though this is exactly how they can experience and understand what they would be selling. Internally, some members of the team posit that we shouldn’t hire anyone who hasn’t downloaded and used the product.

One of the fastest rising stars on our team, Aroa, stood out from other candidates when she downloaded and used Framer extensively before her interview. She even called and asked for an extension of her trial! While she didn’t have a deep technical background she demonstrated a strong curiosity and appetite to learn about technology and Framer. She also read my post A Tribute to My Past, Present and Future Teams which inadvertently delves into my management style, providing a window into how the candidate’s potential future manager thinks.

Aroa showed curiosity to the max. Curious about the product AND curious about the person she’s selling to (me). While it was not as obvious at the time as it is now, this is exactly what we needed on our team. Of course she has strong sales skills (most applicants do), but she’s striking an excellent balance in the type of sales rep we need and the company culture we embrace. Sales skills and product/people curiosity.

Finding the Balance

Accepting that the product team wants the sales team to be awesome at Product is step one. Accepting that we may have a different way of training or passing along that information is step two. Step three is earning the trust of the product team and only then sales can start influencing the roadmap.

Because “sales” is new to the organization the existing team will (or should) do everything they can to educate on product and give as much context as possible. For the first few sales hires this is drinking from a fire hose with trying to understand the industry, the product, where the product fits in the industry and like an alchemist sales reps will pull this together to understand a value proposition to sell.

At Framer we’re fortunate as teams work with each other daily to share knowledge. This allows new people get the information they need to learn and become successful quickly. Because we hire curious/technical people the sales team has built up respect/credibility with other departments so teams are generous with their time to help build sales knowledge. This led to a very healthy environment where the sales team isn’t an isolated monster destroying the companies reputation with clients and company culture within, but a valued resource that speaks the same language as the design, engineering and product teams.

Something that we’ve done after the initial onboarding is to break out regular trainings into various categories. Product Trainings, Product/Industry Fluency, and the Sales Demo/Pitch (putting it all together). Where we probably could have implemented earlier is putting more regimented daily/weekly meetings in the calendar in the early days to stay focused on these areas of product knowledge, but while we were not as tightly regimented as we are now we were able to turn this product knowledge into a balance of product/sales knowledge.

The key is to not lose any momentum from the start on product/industry knowledge. Sales reps are often impatient to go do what they’re good at and generate revenue, but without setting aside enough time to continuously uplevel the product skills/knowledge it will truly fall to the side.

It took us a few months, but we've now fallen into a rhythm with product and sales. The product team began building features/value they thought would help the sales team. The product team quickly saw that different types of value in the product lead to more revenue from sales and the virtuous circle began to take hold. Instead of the sales team demanding a place at the product roadmap table, it was earned over time and then input and direction was sought out by the product team.        

What’s next?

Sales reps often say they are looking for a new job because they are “bored” selling the same thing and it’s often because they are selling a simple product. Joining a product led company implies there is lots to learn about the product and industry, but you will have a hand in shaping the organization into a product and sales balanced company.

Companies like Framer make for a place where the depth of product knowledge is almost endless. Thus ensuring that nobody will get bored anytime soon. It’s the sales team's responsibility to identify what our clients need and cycle that back to our product team to continue the innovation and value creation cycle. To do this we need teammates in sales who are deeply invested in the product as well as our clients' relationship with our product.

This symbiotic relationship is helping Framer shape the future of design.

We’re hiring a ton of new roles for the team, so if you or someone you know fits with our culture please send them our way.

Our Careers Page is HERE